Senge, P. M. 1990. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York, NY: Doubleday.
Notes and Outline by James R. Martin
Deming Main Page | Whole Systems Main Page
Part I. How Our Actions Create Our Reality and How We can Change it.
Chapter 1. Give me a lever long enough ... and single-handed I can move the world.
Breaking problems into parts causes a enormous hidden price. We can not see the consequences of our actions and we loose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole. To build learning organizations we must give up the illusion that the world is made up of separate unrelated forces.
What separates learning organizations from traditional authoritarian controlling organizations is the mastery of five basic disciplines as follows:
Systems Thinking - this is the Fifth discipline. Systems thinking includes a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools to make the full patterns clearer.
Personal Mastery - Continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision. This prevents the reactive mindset where we blame our problems on someone or something else.
Mental Models - Deeply ingrained assumptions that influence the way we understand the world and the actions we take.
Building a Shared Vision - Holding a shared picture of the future we seek to create.
Team Learning - Where team members suspend assumptions and began thinking together.
"The more you learn, the more acutely aware you become of your ignorance."
Senge defines "learning organization" as "an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future." Learning organizations must combine survival learning, or adaptive learning with generative learning. Generative learning enhances the organization’s capacity to create.
Chapter 2. Does your organization have a learning disability?
Seven learning disabilities:
I am my position -
The enemy is out there -
The illusion of taking charge -
The fixation on events -
The parable of the boiled frog -
The delusion of learning from experience -
The myth of the management team -
Chapter 3. Prisoners of the system, or prisoners of our own thinking.
See The Beer Game summary.
Part II. The Fifth Discipline: The Cornerstone of the Learning Organization
Chapter 4. The Laws of the Fifth Discipline.
Chapter 5. A Shift of Mind
Chapter 6. Nature's Templates: Identifying the patterns that control events.
Chapter 7. The principle of leverage.
Chapter 8. The art of seeing the forest and the trees.
Part III. The Core Disciplines: Building the Learning Organization
Chapter 9. Personal Mastery
Chapter 10. Mental Models
Chapter 11. Shared Vision
Chapter 12. Team Learning
Part IV.
Chapter 13. Openness
Chapter 14. Localness
Chapter 15. A manager's Time
Chapter 16. Ending the War between Work and Family
Chapter 17. Microworlds: the Technology of the Learning Organization
Chapter 18. The Leader's New Work
Part V. CODA
Chapter 19. A Sixth Discipline?
Chapter 20. Rewriting the Code
Chapter 21. The Indivisible Whole
Appendix 1: The Learning Disciplines
Appendix 2: Systems Archetypes
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See the following for why so few learning organizations exist. Coutu, D. L. 2002. The anxiety of learning. Harvard Business Review (March): 100-107. (Summary).
Other Books:
Senge, P. M. 2008. The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organisations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World. Nicholas Brealey Publishing Ltd.
Senge, P. M., A. Kleiner, C. Roberts, G. Roth, R. Ross and B. Smith. 1999. The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations. Doubleday.
Senge, P. M., C. O. Scharmer, J. Jaworski and B. S. Flowers. 2004. Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future. Sol.
